I'm super excited about this. For those who don't know how important this is here's a little back story.

Intel has been dominating the Desktop CPU business for about last decade or so. AMD, while present, had minimal impact with their offerings. All of AMDs CPU are low performers compared to Intels. This resulted in people looking for high performing parts to forgo AMD CPUs completely and look solely on Intel's offering. This led to Intel stagnating in performance, as they offered about 5-10% improvement with each new product generation. At the same time Intel always kept their pricing fixed, giving people very little intensive to upgrade unless it was for the new features coming every few generations. That's because AMD could not rival Intel for the past decade. Intel locked consumers on quad core CPUs, offering hexa core and beyond ones for excessive prices.

But all this changes March 2nd, 2017. AMD has been hard at work for the past four years to bring a worthy competitor CPU to Intel's models. AMD announced three new CPUs of the Ryzen family. All of these CPUs are octa cores (they each have eight cores) for disruptive prices. Intels current octa core CPU, the i7-6900k, retails for more than $1000. AMD is offering their Ryzen 7 1800X, also an octa core CPU, for a mere $499. That's more than half the price. The benchmarks they provided show that their Ryzen 7 1800X beats Intel's i7-6900k. But I would wait for independent reviewers to confirm these results.

What's more is that AMD is offering their Ryzen 7 1700 CPU, also an octa core CPU, for a mere $329. For comparison Intel's quad core i7-7700k retails for around $350. That's less money for double the cores. It's worth to mention here that Intels i7-7700k could probably be faster in single threaded performance, AMD only compared them in a multi threaded benchmark were AMD's chip beat Intel's by a wide margin. But overall the value of the Ryzen 7 1700 is much higher than that of Intel's i7-7700k CPU.

If Intel doesn't reduce their prices then AMD will grab a rather large chunk of future CPU purchases. Their prices are extremely disruptive. They finally came back to break Intel's pitiful improvements over their latest generations. Competition is back in the CPU business, which is only good for everyone.

Reviews are out, independent ones that is. My concerns came out to be true. Ryzen can't clock that high even when disabling some cores. What it does is basically brings the prices of higher than quad cores down to earth. Intel's single thread performance on the Kaby Lake quad cores is unmatched and by a wide margin. Intel's HEDT parts are basically screwed. The question is now what suits someones needs better, high parallelism or high single thread performance.